Kelly Akashi Mood Organ
Kelly Akashi Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York Mood Organ
ARCH Athens a thing among things
Sculpture Center Long Exposure
Born in 1983 in Los Angeles, Kelly Akashi currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. The artist graduated with a MFA from University of Southern California in 2014. Akashi studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2006. Akashi was commissioned to create a new outdoor sculpture for the Aspen Art Museum’s Crown Commons, opening in Spring 2020. Winner of the 2019 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, the artist had a residency and exhibition at the foundation in Ojai, California. Other recent residencies include ARCH Athens, Greece (2019) and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2019), both of which concluded with a solo exhibition. Among Akashi’s important solo exhibitions are Long Exposure curated by Ruba Katrib at the SculptureCenter, New York (2017). The artist’s work was featured in the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A. (2016); Brave New Worlds, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs (2019); 99 cents or less, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); LA: A Fiction, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2017); Take me (I’m Yours), curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffmann, and Kelly Taxter, Jewish Museum, New York (2016); and Can’t Reach Me There, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2015). Kelly Akashi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; CC Foundation, Shanghai; M WOODS, Beijing; The Perimeter, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and Sifang Museum, Nanjing, among others.
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Mood Organ
In Mood Organ Akashi challenges the ideological underpinnings of Western structures of knowledge, history, and time in a series of sculptures that formalize alternative models of genealogy and emotional connective currents. The title of the exhibition makes tangible the emotional being in all people, giving it a substance, or an organ, of its own. It also draws from a fictional device, the ‘Penfield Mood Organ’, which questions what we would do if we could control, direct, or utilize our feelings.
Rendered in the artist's evocative vocabulary, works in the exhibition include Weep, a human-sized bronze sphere that slowly emits water, as if softly shedding tears. As a physical embodiment of collective sorrow, this major sculpture also suggests compassion and comfort through its primordial shape and cyclical movement of water.
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Undulating from the ground, a series of walnut pedestals congregate around the tearful fountain. The curves and fluctuations of these hand-carved wood formations are based on the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat, as recorded on an electrocardiogram. Intricate sculptures featuring hand-blown glass, stainless steel and bronze casts of the artist’s own hands connect these objects to a human scale. Together, the sculptures and pedestals evoke instinctive bodily features and gestures, carrying them into perpetual existence. In her work, Akashi draws attention to the fluidity and interconnectedness of the media she uses. Incorporating the body, both as a form and as a medium, the artist captures the tension and complexity of materials, and emphasizes both the impressionability and physicality of objects.
Installation view, Mood Organ, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2020
Akashi’s references to geology, the body, and the natural world are rendered through a series of hand-blown glass branches suspending from the ceiling, sprouting from a rooted pedestal, and emerging from the ground. Like sets of growing limbs, these twisted and thorny forms are draped with rope, intertwining their delicate offshoots with knots and tangles.
In Triple Helix, a collection of eight sumptuous glass vessels are arranged on a black stone surface with a quartz bell hanging above. Reminiscent of the female body and inspired by pre-Colombian urns, the sculptures allude to the mystical origins and instinctual knowledge of humanity encoded in all living people today.
The curvilinear shapes graft past onto future, serving as a lacerated portal to the history of our most basic inclinations. The stone table and the quartz bell ground the works to a geological infrastructure. When struck, the bell emits a low frequency sound that envelops the viewer and penetrates the body through a set of vibrations. Originally used as a timekeeper, the bell serves as a physical and sensual manifestation of time.
ARCH Athens a thing among things
Installation view, a thing among things, ARCH Athens, Athens, 2019
Informed by geological and material indexing, the works in a thing among things bridge Akashi’s ongoing research in transformation and documentation with materials and traditions embedded in the history of Greece. Alongside her use of wax, bronze, stainless steel, and hand-blown glass, traditional Greek materials such as clay, terrazzo, fiber, and marble are utilized in non-traditional ways, to index evidence of change. By embracing the language these culturally significant materials bring to her practice, Akashi generates a new hybrid vocabulary, creating an anachronistic landscape that points back to a fragmented figure moving through tactile surroundings.
—ARCH Athens, a thing among things, 2019
Installation view, a thing among things, ARCH Athens, Athens, 2019
Sculpture Center Long Exposure
Throughout Akashi’s work, glass forms are often placed in combination with other objects, such as candles and lost-wax bronze casts. Akashi displays these diverse elements within specifically designed structures, creating elaborate tableaus. Her arrangements suggest abstracted narratives of use and explore relationships between different forms and materials. For her exhibition at SculptureCenter, Akashi continues her exploration into specific connections between air and fire — two elements necessary to produce her glass works — by periodically lighting wax candles within her installations, altering the appearance of the works over time. Energetic and alchemical transformations of material are central to her work: the objects comprising Akashi’s sculptures are physical manifestations of the intangibility of a breath of air or a burst of flame.
— SculptureCenter, Kelly Akashi: Long Exposure, curated by Ruba Katrib, 2017.